L2 Commerce IQ®: Amazon Search Visibility

ByHoma Zaryouni ·

23 October 2015

Amazon is the first stop for nearly 40 percent of online shoppers searching for products, compared to only 11 percent who use Google. Showing up in search results, therefore, is critical to selling product on the platform.

To decide who shows up in search results, Amazon’s search algorithm considers a number of factors, one of the most important of which is sales volume. For example, looking at the first-page results for “Makeup Remover” searches on Amazon, you can see that products appearing in the first 2 rows of search results in general have higher sales ranks than those appearing in the last row.

This makes for a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy on the platform: to sell a product you have to be found via search, but to show up in search results you have to sell product.

The takeaway? Get in early – due to the cyclical relationship between search visibility and sales, media spend that impacts sales has a first-mover advantage; it will be more expensive for brands to try to catch up later rather than work on their Amazon presence early on.

L2’s Commerce IQ benchmarks brand performance on retailer partner websites. Modules are available for L2 members and include outline best-in-class, retailer-specific tactics and actionable recommendations. Learn more about the Commerce IQ here.